The Works of Pierre Andrès

How to name them? Playful architectures, ball machines? Machines for playing, machines for dreaming?
Finally, ‘singular machines’ is the most appropriate term. For they are truly unique, these wooden structures animated by the hands of players and crossed by balls with unexpected trajectories.
Often comical, sometimes strange, always beautiful and fundamentally poetic, the ‘Machines Singulières’ are the work of a teacher-craftsman-artist with an equally singular and engaging personality. A magician of shapes, movements and sounds who knew how to mobilise the spirit of childhood.

Colette Chantraine-Zachariou, author of ‘Pierre Andrès et ses Machines Singulières’.

The Ball Pump

La ‘Pompe à boules’ (Ball Pump), is also the title of a song written by Steve Waring for his friend Pierre Andrès. It was performed at the Olympia in 1993 and in Cahors in 2006.

Rolling Throne for a Dismantled King

Steve Waring Collection

Pierre Andrès and his Singular Machines, p. 51 - Photo credit: Pierre Bourdis

The Wind Bike

The Magic Orange Tree

Pierre Andrès and his Singular Machines, p. 26

Katchalka

“Katchalka” means “to fall in cascade” in Ukrainian.

Pierre Andrès and his Singular Machines

Machine

The Tower

Pierre Andrès, creator